The hero of the book, Billy Pilgrim, moves randomly through time. His story begins with his birth in 1922. He studies to become an optometrist but is drafted during World War II. He is captured and, along with other prisoners of war, held in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. He survives the bombing and returns to the United States, where he suffers a nervous breakdown. He recovers, gets married, and has two children. Shortly after his daughter's wedding, he is abducted by aliens who take him to the planet Tralfamadore and imprison him in a zoo. There, the perception of time is completely different: every moment, whether past, present, or future, will happen again and again. And thus death does not matter. Pilgrim manages to return to Earth and begins to preach the philosophy of the inhabitants of Tralfamadore, who understand the inevitable collapse of the universe.

Black humor and incomparable imagination, in a great anti-war novel, adapted into a film in 1972 directed by George Roy Hill.

"Fifty years after its first publication, seventy-five years since Vonnegut was inside Slaughterhouse-Five during the bombing of Dresden, what does this great novel have to tell us?

It doesn’t tell us how to stop wars. It doesn’t tell us that wars are hell, although we already know that. It tells us that most people are not bad, except for those who are, and that is valuable information. It tells us that human nature is the one important constant in life and shows us, clearly and truthfully, human nature, not at its best nor at its worst, but as it is most of the time, even in terrible times.”

Salman Rushdie, June 13, 2019, The New Yorker